Keep Your Call Center Scheduling Flexible to Combat Unexpected Conflicts

As we’ve reiterated in this space many times before successful forecasting is absolutely paramount to achieving efficiency in the call center space. Too few people on hand when phones start ringing means money lost on abandonment, too many people on hand when the phones are slow means lost money from shrinkage.

While there are plenty of utilities designed to take all aspects of the day and year into account when estimating staffing needs, there is always a human factor involved and unexpected absences do occur. Having the flexibility to cope with the unexpected will insure that the call center maintains equilibrium between shrinkage and abandonment.

Holidays and the days leading up to them for example are the kind of dates you’ll see more frequent absences.  Having a flexible schedule will help you substitute additional resources should the need for an adjustment in staffing arise.

As Tracey Schelmetic pointed out in an article on the topic a, “critical element of coping with special days is having the ability to do intra-day forecasting and scheduling. It’s important to pay special attention to call volume on “different” days such as holidays or days following unusual marketing activity. When you notice that the actual call volume is different from the forecast, you should be able to easily analyze the deviation and trend lines for both call volume and average handle time, and make changes accordingly by recalculating the forecast for each interval, based on the new information.”

By using a call center scheduling solution to collect information about call volume managers will find it considerably easier to determine what staffing exceptions need to be made. Workforce management tools like those offered by Monet Software give the ability to automate data collection. When the live call volume deviates from estimated you’ll know it’s time to revaluate who’s on the phone.

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco